Presence
“For
those who see me everywhere and see all things in me, I am never lost, nor are
they ever lost to me.”
Bhagavad
Gita 6:30
“I
am present in my servant’s thought of me, and I am with him when he remembers
me.”
Ibn
Arabi
“Ask,
and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will
be opened for you.”
Luke
11:9
Three religious’ traditions, three reassurances that the Divine is with us always and will reveal itself if we seek with our whole heart. We may reach the holy by different paths, but we arrive at the same place. We may use different names for the “ground of all being,” but we are speaking about the same entity. In the Parabola magazine article, “Evolutionary Spirituality,” (Spring, 2020, p.27), biologist Rupert Sheldrake explains it this way: “Both humans and the natural world participate in the divine; we are all sustained from moment to moment by divine Being, the ground of all existence, and participate in the Logos and the Spirit, the basis of our lives and minds.”
When Genesis reveals that we are created in the image of God, it doesn’t mean that God is a giant invisible human, but that we participate in the beingness of the holy. In other words, we are not separate entities, nor is the natural world. It’s not possible to be separate in a cosmos that is, in every way, connected. There are many paths to that understanding simply because it is universal; and humans of various epochs and ethnicities have described it in terms that they and those around them understand.
The fact that we have
many religions is not something that should separate us but is simply a potent indication
of how the human mind seeks to connect with something cosmic; something beyond
its understanding, that it knows exists but cannot see or explain. We are one
people with different languages and different ways of searching for the same Presence.
Isn’t it wonderful that all human beings find that Presence no matter how they
search?
In the Spirit,
Jane
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